LA CIENEGA AREA

San Francisco painter Charley Brown has long since let his work slide into a kind of illustrative boutique Surrealism. A current local show finds paintings scattered among casts of master sculpture. One heartily wishes they would get lost there. The small batch is divided between private-joke images of collapsing pumpkins and all-too-obvious jokes devoted to images of a “Harlequin Goose.” A feeling that our time is being wasted is partly alleviated by Brown’s “Picasso Goose.” The ridiculously bitter and tasteless image reveals a command of painterly skills that proves Brown is pathetically wasting even more of his own time than he is of ours. (Feingarten Galleries, 8380 Melrose Ave., to Feb. 28.).